Canine of SHIELD
by Dinode
Summary: Coulson's team respond to reports of a non-human super-powered being, but when its owner refuses to let them have it, their efforts to bring them in result in a lead on the illusive Centipede.
1. Before the Title Screen

**Dedicated to Superfan44, who came up with the original concept for this story.**

There were days where Mark Cullens loved his job. Today was not one of those days. He supposed it could have been worse, he could have had the night shift, but the early morning shift wasn't much better. He was still really tired, and other people were heading to work, which made navigating his delivery truck through the business section a little more tricky. He was considering whether to turn the radio on when he heard a sound. Did a nearby truck backfire? Then came a sound that was definitely an explosion. He slowed down a bit, just in case. Maybe he was being paranoid, but ever since the Battle of New York a lot of people had done worse. A car passed by him, he kept an eye on it even though he hadn't heard any other noises. Unfortunately, he was so busy keeping an eye on the passing car that he didn't notice the white dog running out of an alley and across the street until he had almost run over it. He slammed on the brakes, even though he knew there was no way he could stop in time, but maybe with luck the dog would only get some broken...

Next thing he knew he was waking up on a stretcher in considerable pain. There were sirens blaring, making his headache even groaned, blinking against the sunlight.

"He's awake," someone shouted, or at least that's what the pain said it was. He let his head roll to the side, and he saw his truck lying on it's side, the front crumpled in. _How'd that happen_, he wondered. He focused what little energy he had left on trying to remember. Just before he passed out, he remembered the last thing he heard before waking up. A bark.


	2. Briefing

_It's good to be back in the States_, thought Skye. _That trip over to Africa to drop off that infected helmet was enough craziness for a long time. For most jobs anyway. In this one, I'd be lucky if it lasted a week._

"Hey, Skye," said Fitz, poking his head through the doorway of her van, "Coulson is calling for us to gather in the briefing room. It looks big."

_Speaking of which..._, she thought as she closed down her laptop and followed the team's engineer upstairs. Almost everyone was already in the briefing room and standing around the central table. Simmons followed right behind her and Fitz.

"Sorry, the new rats didn't seem to want to go back in their cages."

"It's fine, Simmons," Phil Coulson said with a nod. "Now to business; we have been receiving reports of a hostile super being."

"What does this guy do?" asked Agent Ward.

"Actually, this one is different," said Agent May, arms crossed. "We aren't sure what it is, but it definitely isn't humanoid, let alone human."

"Wow, that's new," said Simmons.

"Wait a minute," said Skye, glancing around the table. "Do you mean new as in you haven't seen any, or-"

"Nope," interrupted Simmons, a grin on her face. "Every super being to date has been either human or alien. It's actually a big source of controversy in S.H.I.E.L.D. labs. Even Fitz and I disagree. I think it has to do with the extra space in the brain the Extremis uses that makes humans more likely to mutate into superhumans..."

"While I think it's just that humans spend more time around environments that lead to that kind of mutation," finished Fitz, his own grin rivaling Simmons'.

"But what about the people trying to make super powers? How come no one ever tests those on animals?" asked Skye.

"Because of Captain America," answered Coulson. "No one knows if Dr. Erskine tested on animals before Schmidt forced him to turn him into the Red Skull-"

"Wait, what?"

"-but ever since then, everyone figured that since the Cap was so successful they could skip straight to humans."

"But now," Simmons said, almost squealing in joy, "we can find out why so few animals turn super!"

"Well..." said Coulson with a grimace, "...the reports are inconsistent. While some of them say it is some smallish animal, others claim it is some sort of combat robot."

Fitz's smile shrank a tad. "Well, that would still be cool."

Simmon's smile shrank a lot. "Easy for you to say, you'd still get to figure out how it works!"

"That's assuming we can catch it without it dying or self-destructing," said Ward.

"First we have to find it," said Coulson, touching a point on the table and bringing a map to a screen on the wall. "This shows the list of confirmed sightings," he continued, gesturing to the zig-zag path. "Skye, Ward, and Fitz will cover the location of the first sighting and try to figure out where it came from. May, Simmons, and I will check the latest sighting, about half an hour ago."


	3. First Sighting

"Wow, this seems eerily familiar," commented Skye, looking at the wrecked truck and thinking about the semi flipped by gravitonium. Thanks to their credentials, the police had let them take over the examination of the scene. Fitz's probes were examining the various dents, the ground in front of it, and nearby walls.

"Well, there are some superficial similarities," Fitz said, examining the tablet in his hand. "It wasn't a shift of gravity that did this, but based on these dents, it wasn't a collision either."

"I thought the witnesses said the truck ran into whatever it was," said Ward as he tapped his knuckles on the caved-in metal on the front.

"They did, but according to this reverse simulation I just worked up, the vehicle was actually struck by a directed shockwave."

Ward turned and raised an eyebrow. "But there aren't any scorch marks from an explosion."

"The data doesn't lie, Ward."

"Okay," said Skye, trying to keep things from getting out of hand. "Anything else you can tell about the super?"

"Well," said Fitz, turning back to his tablet, "the source of the shockwave was about bumper level, maybe a bit lower. Total generation time was probably less than half a second, some margin of error there, and . . . hmm, that's interesting."

"What?" asked Skye, leaning over his shoulder to get a look.

"According to this, whatever it was launched backwards at a tremendous acceleration."

"Okay, that makes sense. Newton's second law."

"Third law!" he snapped. "Second law is mass times acceleration, third law is action-reaction!"

"Whoa, sorry, high-school dropout here."

"So you're saying it was a propulsion method, not an attack?" interrupted Ward.

Fitz shrugged. "Who knows? I just know what it did, not why or how."

"Maybe it went in there," Skye said, pointing to an alley at the end of the street between a bakery and a jewelry store. "You know, after it rocketed away and before moving on to the next sighting."

"Could be," Fitz answered as he called his probes back into the briefcase sitting next to him, closed it, and picked it up. "Let's check it out."

"Speaking of mass and acceleration," Ward said as they started walking, "can you tell how heavy this thing is?"

Fitz shook his head. "Too many variables, even air temperature could affect the strength of the shockwave, and it could have had internal dampeners to keep it from accelerating as much. Even if I could, at most we might be able to rule out an animal, but we have no idea how dense a robot would be."

"Well maybe that could help answer some unknowns." Fitz and Skye looked where Ward was pointing. About halfway down the alley, past several dumpsters and a half-dozen garbage cans, they could see a high wooden fence with a padlocked gate. Said padlock was somewhat useless now, since a cannonball sized hole had appeared right through one of the hinges, causing the whole thing to hang at a weird angle.

"It might," Fitz breathed before dropping the briefcase and sending the probes scurrying over the garbage cans' trash.

Skye looked at the hole with a worried expression. "That thing was able to survive that and move on."

"And pretty quickly too. The next sighting was three minutes later," Ward said, arms crossed.

"Hang on, Bashful's got something," Fitz interrupted.

"What is it," Skye and Ward asked at the same time. Fitz held up his tablet to them, showing a zoomed up image of something white caught in the wood at the edge of the hole."

"Hair."


	4. Last Sighting

"So it's confirmed to be an animal?"

"Great!" Simmons said, clapping her hands before Coulson's glare reminded her to get back to examining the burns on a tree planted next to the street as a decoration for a parking lot. Coulson turned away and continued talking with Ward on the phone.

"You're next to a jewelry store, right?" he said. "They often have security cameras along the outside walls. Head inside and ask to see the recordings. We may get more information." After getting an affirmative he hung up and turned back to Simmons. "Find anything?"

"Well," she said as she scraped some charcoal from the leftmost tunnel through the tree into a small plastic bag. "I'll need to do a full analysis back at The Bus to be sure, but these scorches seem to be from some kind of high energy laser."

"Which would explain the reports of 'beams of light'," May said without looking up from her map of the path taken by the super taped to the wall of their van. While Simmons argued with herself quietly about whether the laser could be a natural part of the creature or a weapon attached to it, Coulson stepped into the van and stood next to May.

"What are you thinking about?" he asked.

"I think I know where it's gone." She gestured to the Northeast portion of the map. "At first it took a random path, even looping in on itself at one point." She started moving her finger towards the Southwest. "Until it gets here, after which it moves in a more or less straight line, and a little under a mile from the end of that line . . ."

"Is the city park," Coulson finished.

"Lightly forested; even more lightly peopled on a weekday. A perfect place to hide whatever species you are."

"Simmons!" Coulson called out the door. "Finish up and get in. We're going to the park, and it's not for a picnic."

* * *

The alley was still. Not even a roach disturbed the camera's view from high on the wall. Sunlight had just begun to poke above the buildings when that changed and a white blur flew across the screen and crashed through a gate in a fence that split the alley in half. As the resulting dust settled over the now crooked gate, a head shoved through the gap at the bottom. A moment later the dog it belonged to hopped through the hole and started trotting away, momentarily positioned in profile view against the camera before it and everything else froze.

"Isn't it beautiful?" asked Simmons as her finger moved away from the pause button. She and Coulson were sitting in the back of the van as May drove along the main road through the park, analyzing the video that Skye had just sent them. "I can hardly wait to cut it open and see how it works."

Coulson pointed at the side of the dog, where a black pointed streak appeared on its otherwise pure white fur. "What do you suppose that is?"

"Can't tell from here, but something seems off about it. It may be natural, but we can't discount the possibility that it has something to do with how it got its powers."

Coulson passed the tablet up to May, who grabbed it with her right hand while holding the wheel with her left. "May, I need you to memorize what this dog looks like."

"Understood sir."

"Simmons, what is your advice for approaching it?"

Simmons did a double take. "Sir, you're asking me? My area of expertise isn't zoology..."

"Neither is mine," interrupted Coulson. "I know your last heavy decision nearly ended poorly, but that hadn't been your call and you did come up with a cure in time. I have confidence in your abilities, and your knowledge of biochemistry still gives you more knowledge on animals than the rest of us. This time, I am making it your call."

Simmons gave a nervous smile. "Well, I did take one course on animal behavior." She turned her head, her mind beginning to come up with a solution. "Honestly, sir, this isn't going to be like a normal welcoming committee. Everything indicates that this dog has just received or unlocked its powers, and it's confused and scared. I... really think the safest thing to do would be to use the night-night gun on it. If I rework the dosage for an animal its size, it should stay unconscious until we can get it restrained, or at least caged."

"In that case," he said as he pulled out the gun in question and handed it to Simmons, "you had best get started."

* * *

Meanwhile, in a poorly lit and cramped room, a man strapped to a chair braced himself for his torturer's incoming fist. The pain that came did not disappoint him.

"Consider that your first payment," the bald man snarled. "'Cause you owe me a lot more. My buddy Shawn was among those killed when your creation escaped." With that, he gave another punch, this time to the stomach.

"That's enough!" came a feminine voice from the door. The man turned and saw a short woman in a black and white flowered dress enter the room. No guards came with her, she didn't need them. He knew better than to mess with her.

"I was just-" he began, but she interrupted him.

"Your orders were to restrain him, not to interrogate him. Your enthusiasm is noted, but you must be more cautious in the future to not expand on your duties. After all, that is why he is in trouble."

Relieved that she didn't seem to know how far he had intended to go and his motivations, he hastily bid his departure. The woman turned towards the prisoner trying to glare at her from his seat while also trying to get his breath back after the beating he got.

"If you're going to do more than you are asked, go ahead and ask us next time," she said.

"There isn't going to be a next time," he said.

"Don't be too sure." She softened her voice to an apologetic tone. "It's true we underestimated your gifts, but your creation showed us how incredible your genius truly is, far too amazing to be wasted on a mere technician. I've been contacted by my employer, and he has agreed that a promotion and raise is in order. Think of the life you could get for yourself and-"

The man interrupted. "Here's what I will tell you: I've been stealing parts for a little over a year preparing for this. Eight months ago I contacted a cancer-ridden surgeon and asked him to perform one last surgery. He implanted two devices of my own creation within me: one near my heart, and one at the base of my neck. If at any point my body gets in too much pain, they both will self-destruct, taking my secrets from you forever. Same thing happens if they detect mind-altering drugs, or if the other device is tampered with." He gave a short laugh. "Did you really think I put myself through all this out of resentment? You were perfectly right about me until I realized how far you all were below even my standards. After that I poured myself into my studies at home until I figured out how to stop you."

The woman smiled condescendingly. "Except it seems you haven't, nor is your bluffing going to help you."

"Go ahead and x-ray me, you'll see I am perfectly serious."

She paused for a moment, her smile faltering, but then she eased it back up again. "Even if that were so, there are other ways of making you talk if we have to. One in particular. We've already sent some men to invite her here."

The man suddenly looked up sharply. "I already warned her not to come, and you can't make her. He's with her already."

"Thanks for letting us know," she said as she turned to the door, the man just realizing his slip. "Now we can take care of both at once."


End file.
